“Girls Don’t Read Comics.”
I’d read comics for years, I drew comics, I wanted to make comics professionally. Every girl I knew to whom I gave a comic read it with joy. But, for the most part, the people in comics did not really want little girls in comics.
They didn’t want to think of them. They didn’t want them around.
I got a Marvel Comics company calendar with the names and birth dates of many Marvel employees. There were a number of women on that calendar. So why was I hearing that girls didn’t read comics? Surely, some girl at Marvel read comics.
And someone at DC sure knew girls read comics. Because one of those APAs I belonged to, Interlac, the Legion of Super-Heroes APA, got passed around the DC offices, and spotted by Legion of Super-Heroes artist Keith Giffen. He called me up and asked if I’d like to audition to draw the Legion.
Hot diggity. My very favorite comic, featuring my very favorite biggest crush superhero!
Alas... too late.
I’d already agreed to sign on with a small press publisher. The letter of agreement I signed wasn’t binding, but I still felt I had to honor it. So instead of going right to the big leagues, I spent years toiling for lousy pay at exploitative small press publishers.
And no Element Lad.
But all was not lost. My uber-crush on Element Lad was so well-known, it became a kind of industry joke. My very first job for DC Comics was a pin-up of Element Lad in an issue of Who’s Who. For nearly 18 years, whenever DC ran a solo story or needed a pin-up of E-Lad, DC Comics came to me for the job. Other comic book artists from Curt Swan to Dave Cockrum sent me sketches of Element Lad bringing me flowers and candy.
My Element Lad uber-crush gave me my big break in comics. From my first scribblings in an APAzine, to my first mainstream comics gig!
So strange, the bizarre mixed messages from the comics world: a little gig here and there, the fun of having the pros you like and respect include you in the comics universe by giving you a connection to the focus of your girly crush... and then the reality that it was an industry that didn’t really like or respect girls very much, that deeply resented our presence to the extent that store owners felt comfortable enough telling us our business wasn’t welcome, and respected male pros acted like our only purpose in the industry was as potential girlfriend material.
The meme wasn’t merely that “Girls Don’t Read Comics,” it was also that “Girls Could Not Read Comics.”
One pro after another pontificated that women weren’t visual, that only men could understand the storytelling process. Wasn’t that why men were all the greatest designers, greatest cartoonists, greatest film directors?
Men read and enjoy porn. This proves that they are visual, while women reject porn. This proves that they are not visual. Therefore, the dominance of the visual in comics repels women, in the same way porn repels women.
I’m not making this up. I wish I were.
For years, I spent most of my waking hours thinking about, reading and drawing comics. When I became a comics pro, there wasn’t a single day at a comics show or an encounter with almost any male pro that didn’t devolve into a moratorium on why I should not be there, why I should not do what I wanted to do, or why I should not read comics, or draw them. Even women bought into this mess. To this day, some women bloggers will go on at tedious length about why women don’t (or shouldn’t) read superheroes.
When boys escape from reality into fiction, comics responds. When girls do, comics recoils.
I dug through the trash to raise money for comics, spent countless hours and days plowing through every dusty box of old papers in every flea market in the county to find comics, and spent 40 hours or more a week after school drawing comics, only to be told “Girls Don’t Read Comics.”
When I tell young women cartoonists tales of my early days in the biz, they look at me as if I came from the moon. They never experience discrimination, no one avoids them because they’re girls, no one tells them they have some sort of visual processing handicap that is somehow estrogen related, no editor tries to crawl up their skirt.
Therefore discrimination against women in comics doesn’t exist. I’m really glad it doesn’t exist for them, because there are better things to do in life than deal with dumb crap like old farts who didn’t want icky girls in the clubhouse.
This icky girl went on to a very nice comics career. I doubt I’d have stuck it out, or even read comics in the first place, if a couple of the characters in them weren’t awesomely cute.
So, thanks Aquaman. Our love is true.
Except for the part where I dumped you for Element Lad. But it was great while it lasted. Swim on, little goldfish!
Most superhero tales are just soap operas where people beat each other up. Everything that made Chris Claremont’s run on the classic Uncanny X-Men tales popular could have given All My Children five seasons of hanky material. I don’t know a single female comics fan that didn’t have an enormous crush on Nightwing, half the readers of the classic Teen Titans were swooning teen girls, and even though I think Morpheus is the worst boyfriend ever, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was half goth sex appeal.
Get a clue, publishers.
Go ahead, think we’re silly girls going pitty pat over fictional characters. Snarl at the Twilight fans invading San Diego Comic-Con. Sneer at the manga. Sell to the guy drooling over Dark Phoenix, but recoil from the girl sighing over Gambit.
Something is taking over your industry.
Girls. With big crushes.
Editors’ Bios & Acknowledgements
Lynne M. Thomas is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, where she is responsible for popular culture special collections that include the literary papers of over 50 SF/F authors. She is the co-author of Special Collections 2.0, with Beth Whittaker (Libraries Unlimited, 2009), as well as academic articles about cross-dressing in dime novels and using libraries to survive the zombie apocalypse. She is perhaps best known as the co-editor of the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) with Tara O’Shea, and Whedonistas (2011) with Deborah Stanish; both books were published by Mad Norwegian Press. Along with the Geek Girl Chronicles book series, Lynne is the editor of Apex Magazine, an online professional prose and poetry magazine of science fiction, fantasy, horror and mash-ups of all three. For more about Lynne and her shenanigans, please visit lynnemthomas.com.
Sigrid Ellis is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and comics; an editor; a parent of two homeschooled children; and an air traffic controller. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her partner, their kids, her partner’s other partner, and a host of pets both vertebrate and invertebrate. Her work can be found in the online speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons and in Mad Norwegian’s Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them.
Acknowledgements: Books are the work of many hands, anthologies more so than most. In addition to our friends and family, the editors would like to extend particular thanks to Alisa Bendis, Amanda Conner, Terry Moore, Greg Rucka and Louise Simonson for their time and conversation. We would also like to thank Sean Ausmus, Elizabeth Bear, Michelle Billingsley, Paul Cornell, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Neil Gaiman, Lorraine Garland, Ellen Kushner, Michael Lee, Carla Speed McNeil, Robyn Moore, Tara O’Shea, and Steven A. Torres-Roman for all of their help.
Credits
Publisher / Editor-in-Chief
Lars Pearson
Design Manager / Senior Editor
Christa Dickson
Associate Editor (Chicks Dig Comics)
Damian Taylor
Associate Editor (Mad Norwegian Press)
Joshua Wilson
The publisher wishes to thank...
A very special thank you to Lynne and Sigrid for the time, talent and sweat that they poured into making this book happen – I was always rested comfortably in the knowledge that exactly the right editors had been hired for the job. Thanks are also due t
o Christa Dickson (my favorite chick who digs comics); Katy Shuttleworth, for providing a cover that knocked it out of the park; and Damian Taylor, whom I suspect smothered all manner of brushfires without my even knowing about it. A very personal and heartfelt thank you goes to Amanda Conner, Colleen Doran, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Mark Waid, who were all immensely supportive of all of my various endeavors back when I was just a little Norwegian (or so it felt at times) at Wizard magazine. Thanks to all of the writers who contributed to this book, as well as to Jeremy Bement, Alisa Bendis, Shawne Kleckner, George Krstic, Shoshana Magnet, Cameron and Steph McCoy, Terry Moore, Tara O’Shea, Greg Rucka, Louise Simonson, Robert Smith?, Josh Wilson, and that nice lady who sends me newspaper articles.
Mad Norwegian Press
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Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 25